There's a lot of excitement starting on the site about creating a fresh-harvest infused olive oil, a method so carefully developed by PsyCro and written up in his thread Olive oil extract update. I've adapted it a bit for my own purposes, but I recommend you read through his instructions. I've cleaned them up a bit in a blog PsyCro's Olive Oil Extraction Method. He's since updated to include using a pressure cooker. I'll share that in the next post, but let's start with the stovetop version. On to the fun.

The plant was cut, washed, and hung to drip dry for about four hours. I stop about an hour after they've been hanging and give the branches a shake to get the water from the wash released. I'll be weighing it for bud-to-oil ratios, and I don't want that additional water mucking up my potency calculations.

Buds were all clipped into the stock pot. This is a 3-quart stainless and for this run I used 350 grams of buds and 437 ml of olive oil. PsyCro's recipe is for 400 grams of bud for every 500 ml of olive oil.

Correction: PsyCro's original measurements were for 400 grams of wet buds to 1 liter of olive oil. I didn't realize I'd inadvertently cut the olive oil volume in half when I began making my own potent oil.

This potency has been extremely therapeutic, so I won't be changing my personal recipe of 400 grams of wet buds to 500 ml of olive oil. You control the potency of the oil by the volume of materials, and this ratio has proven to be a winner in my home and with my patients. I leave it up to you to determine your own strength. PsyCro has suggested it could be made as potent as triple-strength, 400 grams of wet buds to 0.3 ltr of olive oil. That would need to be carefully dosed, and probably wouldn't be something you'd want to use with a novice.

What was left was placed into small jars with open tops and dropped into the refrigerator for a two-week dry under low temp and humidity. Another experiment I'm playing with. It's a technique I learned from Dr Ziggy. It may be a way to retain more of the terpene profile during the drying stage.

Add the olive oil.

Get out the immersion blender and blend away. This take a good while so be kind to the blender. I found short bursts of power a better fit. That's a lot of plant material you're breaking down. Take your time and turn it to mush.

I've since learned that this part of the process can be made easier by adding a cup of water. It gives you more liquid to incorporate the bud into, and you'll be boiling the water off anyway.

I keep going until I can't identify any piece of what I'm looking at, other than "green" and "plant material." :laugh2:

The stainless pot sits in a Dutch oven that gets filled with oil to create a double boiler. A water bath won't get temperatures in the pot high enough to decarb. I use Canola oil. Avoid cheap vegetable oils.

The rings in the bottom keep the stainless pot away from direct heat. Four of them lend stability to the arrangement. We're playing with hot oil here, it pays to be extra cautious.

Turn the fire on low and let the oil get up to temperature. This isn't a process you're going to rush. Block out the next three hours, or more. I've dedicated entire days to harvest through finished oil. The potency is worth the effort, I assure you. I've learned that if you keep the fire low the oil will heat without spiking and you don't have to be so anal about temperatures. As you'll see, when the temperature gets to 212 F decarb kicks in and there's no denying it's working.

This thermometer was a gift from a member. It's become invaluable to me. I recommend you search one out if you intend to be making cannabis oils

You'll be stirring every five minutes or so for the next three hours. After about 10-20 minutes you'll begin to see movement.

When you hit a consistent temperature of 212 degrees F (100 degrees C) set the timer for two hours. According to PsyCro's directions you're looking for a baseline of 221 degrees F (105 degrees C) for two hours. I personally try to keep mine at between 220 -230 degrees for at least 45 minutes of that two hours.

I no no longer time the process. I'm watching the decarb bubbles, as documented below. Once the bubbles stop your decarb is finished.

Initially what you're doing is boiling off the water. Keeping the temps in this range protects the cannabinoids. When enough of the water boils off and the temperature kicks in active decarboxylation it can get dramatic. The depth of this pot was by design. You don't want hot oil and this watery mix to meet. Trust me, I speak from experience.

When it got to this stage, just before that dramatic moment I spoke of earlier, I added a tablespoon of liquid sunflower lecithin. This was at 4:40 PM.

4:41 PM

4:42 PM

4:43 PM

5:19 PM Still actively decarbing, but you can see the activity has dropped off.

5:21 PM, and you're beginning to see oil through the bubbles.

5:38 PM

5:41 PM Close to done now.

5:45 PM You could stop at this point and still have some acid cannabinoids present.

5:47 PM was my stopping point. Just two minutes later and decarb was almost entirely complete.

Strain it out, pressing and squeezing all you can manually.

PsyCro left instructions for reclaiming the oil bound up in the plant material.

Securely tie up the bundle of plant material and drop it into a pot of boiling water. I find bouncing it in the water helps release the oil.

Strain the water into a bowl or another pot and start the process again.

At some point I begin skimming the oil off the top of the water. I found it most efficient to skim into a measuring cup, and then skim once again into a custard cup.

Working like this I reclaimed 1/3 cup of oil from my last batch. There's still water in with it that can be boiled off if you choose. I'm using mine for medicated bath salts, so it wasn't necessary to do so. I have done this and got almost all of the oil I started with back, much like PsyCro's claims. That would've been a tragic loss to have simply tossed the leftover plant material after manually squeezing out what I could. I have made that mistake in the past.

Once the oil is strained, add another tablespoon of liquid sunflower lecithin, stir until it's incorporated and refrigerate for 24 hours to allow the lecithin to disperse and encapsulate the components. Gently bring it back to room temp, stir well and fill capsules or use in edibles. Stir periodically while you fill capsules to assure everything's mixed well. Like the biobombs, the lecithin can separate overnight the first time, though not to the extent it will with CCO.

So why do this labor-intensive method? Well, if you have mites like I did it allows you to save the harvest from the compost pile. Beyond that motivation, there's a strong argument to be made that more of the terpenes and flavonoids are locked into the olive oil, thus potentiating the cannabinoids with a stronger entourage effect. I've made many types of oils, including CCO, and in my personal opinion, this oil rivals anything I've tested.

Don't discount the value of processing on the day you harvest. There's nothing left except the roots, the stalk, the branches and the cooked down plant material. No plant hangs in my small apartment today, as is the norm when I dry before making oil. That was more of a relief than I anticipated.

Another tool in the oil-maker's belt. This is potent oil, loaded with medicinal value from the cannabis, the olive oil and the lecithin emulsifying it all together. You control the decarb, opening interesting possibilities. It's going to be more potent than you're thinking it is, I'll tell you that. What I made was so potent it forced me to change my dosing strategy.

I hope this helps someone gain the confidence to try this method. PsyCro is working out using a pressure cooker, and he's wonderfully pleased with how it's turning out. It's covered in his thread. Have fun with it.

PsyCro has adapted this method to use a pressure cooker. It streamlines the process tremendously and apparently presents a more powerful oil than before, which is pretty darned potent, let me tell you.

He starts his discussion of this improvement on the technique on page 11 of his thread and that discussion continues for a page or two. Olive oil extract update

The thread above got me thinking, so i found as much info as i could, and guess what.. PRESSUREfriggin'COOKER!!!

Hooked up a pressure gauge to my old pressure cooker and found it to be the low pressure type.. with low heat 4.5psi.. which translates to about 106-107 degrees Celsius.

Filled it up a quarter way with water, threw in the grass, used the immersion blender to grind it all up. Put the olive oil in, brought it to a boil and blended it all some more. Closed it up, and left it for just under 2 hours.. end result:

- not neeeaarly as much smell as usual.
- from one liter of oil got back just under 0.9L ( as opposed to 8.5).
- the two points above indicate on very important thing, MUCH less evaporation loss = more complete oil.
- color of the oil in the end is much more 'normal', a nice green color, as opposed to the dark color i get with the original method.
- potency, well its at least as potent as before, no problem there. Used a new strain so its a bit new to me and different, but yeah, potency is definitely there.

All in all, pressure cooker for me from now on.

One great thing about this method is the possibility to make a more concentrated oil.. but i wouldn't recommend over 3 times the strength.. for eg. 400 grams fresh material to 0.3L olive oil. Any more than that gets tricky to dose for low tolerance patients.

ShiggityFlip did a run the other day using a water bath, a method we were surprised to find worked very well, under the right conditions. I work in a large stock pot, which won't work without the additional heat of the oil bath. Apparently placing it into jars and doing the water bath will work, with the heated water more up close and personal with the plant material. He's thinking maybe go with quart jars filled no more than half way. These small jars bubbled over when the water started boiling off and decarb began.

So after 2 hours there were definitely no Co2 bubbles so I poured the jars into a fine mesh nylon bag used for brewing that I placed inside a large brewing funnel. Twisting the bag got most of the oil out and using a rubber gloved hand I squeezed the rest of the oil out. Looks like I will yield about 500ml of the original 600ml oil. Which is good considering I am not doing the water reclaim method. I do have to get the water out of the left jar. I will pipette most of the oil off and then heat to evaporate the water left in the oil.

I already have size "0" capsules because the "00" looked to big for my lady to swallow. And she definitely won't do suppositories! So now looks like I have a half liter of fresh harvest oil to play with!! So excited!

Well-Known Member

Well it doesn't seem that hard to make, only very time consuming. Only down side is that I don't have as much Cannabis as you do and my harvest is by far not fresh. 2 months old already? I would still be able to make RSO from it but it won't be as good as fresh harvests

New Member

Sue, thank you so much for putting this tutorial together! Your posts are giving me so much confidence to make these items when my first harvest comes.

_________________________________________________
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The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things.- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Well-Known Member

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Hizzy tried this the other day and it boiled over and made a mess. If you could work out the volumes it might work, but that's a lot of trial and error and possible oily mess to clean up where you didn't intend it to be. When it hits that point when it foams it's always more dramatic than I remember, and for me it triggers a flashback to when I lost the DDA harvest to this method and my mistake of letting the oil and water mix.

When I did my emergency tear down I decarbed the buds in the oven for an hour, tossed the bag of limp material into the freezer to cool and then ran a normal run of the MB2 for 2 hours. It wasn't anywhere near the potency this method produced. Might have been more potent given more cooking time. I was pressed to get the entire tent processed as quickly as possible.

With the pressure cooker PsyCro had the temperature his pressure cooker produced and probably choose the two hour timing because it was his best guess on the time necessary to decarb, based on the chart he was using. Without testing we have no idea how much decarb actually occurred, but he said it was at least as potent as the stovetop produced.

Photo of the Month: May 2018

I have just tried the latest method first put out by ShiggityFlip 125mg of Durban Poison & 300 mg olive oil, pulverized with immersion grinder. Put it in qt jar with loose lid and boiled for 1hr 40 min. untill there weren't any bubbles. I've only tried licking utensils and cleaning up. BUZZZZZZ: :woohoo::woohoo::woohoo:

Well-Known Member

Using smaller Ball Jars looks easier. With my PMR, I can't be lifting heavy pots. I just don't want to have a problem with hot oil!

I do have access to a testing lab. My MMJ office has a discount arranged with a lab, for its patients that grow and want lab numbers. I would be happy to drop off any infused oil or bud, whatever... ya just have to figure out how to mail it safely to me. I would be happy to SPLIT the cost of the lab fee, for a small sample of the oil to keep + one CBD seed.

Using smaller Ball Jars looks easier. With my PMR, I can't be lifting heavy pots. I just don't want to have a problem with hot oil!

I do have access to a testing lab. My MMJ office has a discount arranged with a lab, for its patients that grow and want lab numbers. I would be happy to drop off any infused oil or bud, whatever... ya just have to figure out how to mail it safely to me. I would be happy to SPLIT the cost of the lab fee, for a small sample of the oil to keep + one CBD seed.

I supply this oil I make to three patients. My daughter and I were talking today about the therapies. All three are immediate family members who live in close proximity to my apartment, so we can keep track fairly easily.

My daughter is treating many things, primary among them a debilitating anxiety disorder and all the attending complications, one of which was the lack of consistent sound sleep.

The BIL is treating diabetes and bipolar. Sleep has been a dream he hasn't had a means to achieve for decades.

The third patient is a cancer patient with long-term insomnia that's resisted any and all treatment up to this point. It's been a concern for decades.

All three have reported sleeping soundly for 6-8 hours every night. This has dramatically improved the quality of their lives. All three believed there was no solution. All three got immediate relief from the first dose.

If this was all the capsules did it would be worth the time, effort, and expense, but we know the benefits of a cannabinoid therapy don't stop with sleep alone. The BIL tells me his mind is calm at long last, and he's been able to walk to the store and get groceries without debilitating pain. My cancer patient tells me he's finally able to get past the pain and focus on things other than solitaire. My daughter's benefits are too numerous to mention. For the first time in her life she knows what the rest of us feel in day-to-day life, the ability to function without fear. She has a lot of catching up to do.

I didn't go through any grueling process to get them to this point. I determined the potential strains, based on what I had on hand, grew the plants, turned them into oil and started them each on a personal capsule dosing schedule that we're constantly refining. My goal isn't to heal, but to offer relief, so the body can heal itself. So far, it appears to be working, in great part due to this fresh harvest oil.

Being so potent means we can get away with fewer doses. This makes my life easier.

Nug of the Year: 2016 - Member of the Month: Sept 2015, Nov 2016 - Nug of the Month: Oct 2016 - Plant of the Month: May 2016

Thanks Sue. Good stuff. Glad I found this thread again. I was going to sub in last time I found it, then my phone died again.
A question, sort of. I read that after about 70% decarb you are losing THC, as it converts to CBN, faster than you are gaining it from the THCa being converted. I was told to stop decarbing once the bubbles slow down a bit- as a sort of guesstimate of that 70% mark. Do you agree with this (apparently not- or you like a little CBN in the mix).

Of course I don't know anything about this stuff. I've found the decarb temps/time topic a lttile confusing, as you know cause you had to read a zillion PMs from me asking dumb questions about it. :laugh2:

I use coconut oil Rad. You want oils with twelve chains of less. Coconut was such a superior choice that I didn't look any further. I personally love the smell. I found a partial table that shows the acceptable fats to be butterfat of coconut oil.

I've been doing nightly soaking baths using Epsom salts infused with coconut oil I made from immature leaves, just to get this oil used up before I make a stronger batch. It's only been four days but I'm seeing some improvement. I'm maintaining a healthy skepticism that I've found a solution to something that's dogged me for over 20 years, but my skin is responding well to the combination of coconut oil and cannabinoids.

New Member

So I went away shortly after we started playing sue, to the forest of peace and tranquility!!(not what it's really called) Love disconnecting. I must say this took off and now I feel so behind in something I'm really wanting to stay on top of.
That said,my best friend loves long mountain walks several times a day. Her hips do not. So I gave her .2-.3ml with her lunch and dinner. She ran or walked fast every walk, stairs were no longer much issues. She followed smells off the trail which has been a while that she's made that kinda of effort.

Last time I was out there, when we came home she laid on the couch and her bed. No real movement for a few days. This time all is still well with her and I'm still dosing her,but once a day.
Couple months till I can play,should have much more to play with

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